I don’t believe Apple has said whether or not they send them in their initial referral to NCMEC, but law enforcement could easily get a warrant for them. iCloud Photos are encrypted at rest, but Apple has the keys.
(Many have speculated that this CSAM local scanning feature is a precursor to Apple introducing full end-to-end encryption for all of iCloud. We’ll see.)
Apple has outlined[1] multiple levels of protection in place for this:
1. You have to reach a threshold of matches before your account is flagged.
2. Once the threshold is reached, the matched images are checked against a different perceptual hash algorithm on Apple servers. This means an adversarial image would have to trigger a collision on two distinct hashing algorithms.
3. If both hash algorithms show a match, then “visual derivative” (low-res versions) of the images are inspected by Apple to confirm they are CSAM.
Only after these three criteria are met is your account disabled and referred to NCMEC. NCMEC will then do their own review of the flagged images and refer to law enforcement if necessary.
You are correct — most of the iCloud data is not end-to-end encrypted. Apple discusses which data is end-to-end encrypted at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
> As far as this is concerned, seems like if you don’t use iMessage or iCloud you’re safe for now.
Yes, this is correct. The Messages feature only applies to children under 18 who are in an iCloud Family, and the photo library feature only applies if you are using iCloud Photos.
- Matching against a known set of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) hashes occurs on-device (as opposed to the on-server matching done by many other providers)
- Multiple matches (unspecified threshold) are required to trigger a manual review of matched photos and potential account suspension
The page you linked to is for the Primetime Emmys, which are the biggest awards that make it into the main TV broadcast (Prime Video has 4 nominations there). But there are also the Creative Arts Emmys, which include many more awards, often in more technical categories (where Prime has an additional 14 nominations).
There are some features for group messaging on iMessage that aren’t available in Group MMS. If you add a non-iMessage user to your group, the group downgrades to using Group MMS, which does still work for basic messaging, but the group loses all of its iMessage-exclusive features.
Apple has a well known exception to the rule requiring an option to subscribe inside the app for “reader” apps, a vaguely defined which includes Netflix, Spotify, Dropbox, and seemingly whatever else is convenient to Apple.
Apple did not lift this requirement for the Hey email app during the controversy over that last year. Instead, they reached a compromise where Hey would offer a free trial of their service inside the app, so they could be in compliance with the rule that an app must have some functionality without an account.